20.02.13
Leeds child heart surgery decision due next month
The High Court hearing on the proposal to end child heart surgery at Leeds hospital under the Safe and Sustainable reconfiguration has now finished.
A decision is due by March 7.
Campaign group Save our Surgery brought a judicial review against the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts (JCPCT) decision to reorganise surgery at fewer centres to improve the quality and safety of care.
The decision followed the Safe and Sustainable review, which recommended that units should be closed at Leeds, Leicester and the Royal Brompton in London, to ensure each remaining unit handles more cases per year and has more specialists with the right levels of experience.
Sir Neil McKay CB, chair of the JCPCT, said: “Everyone agrees that the NHS should expand access to local care and pool surgical expertise in fewer larger centres and we outlined in considerable detail our defence of the process in the High Court.
“We believe the consultation was transparent, fair and lawful and that the 77,000 respondents to consultation were given detailed information needed to make an intelligent response to the consultation.
“We believe that the detailed narrative report produced by the independent expert panel chaired by Professor Sir Ian Kennedy outlined far more effectively the panel’s assessment of each surgical centre including where hospitals were not meeting the standards.”
Sharon Cheng of Save Our Surgery said: “Despite the picture that NHS managers have tried to paint, this case is not about loyalty to a local hospital, nor is it a criticism of Newcastle. Instead, it challenges the legality of a process and decision that has been flawed throughout and puts patients’ interests at the bottom of its priority list.
“The court hearing has underlined what we have always believed: that the supposed consultation was conducted with one outcome in mind: keeping the Newcastle children’s surgery unit open in order to protect a transplant service.
“With protection of their past spending in Newcastle shown to be NHS officials’ number one priority, and their court argument strongly implying that the public consultation would never have made a difference to the outcome, we must ask why they wasted people’s time and millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money – Leeds could never have been selected as one of the units to survive.
“From their comments in court, the consultation appears to have been a rubber stamping exercise, with clinicians, MPs and patients in this region fooled into feeling they had influence.”
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